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‘Spurious’ is the word we want

Ian Gilmour

Diplomacy and Disillusion at the Court of Margaret Thatcher by George Urban
Tauris, 206 pp, £19.95, September 1996, ISBN 1 86064 084 2

This book tells how the author fell in and out of love with Margaret Thatcher. Although George Urban found her ‘an attractive lady’, with ‘the movements, the legs and walk of a young woman’, his love affair was wholly ideological. Urban, who is or was on the extreme right, was attracted by ‘the great spirit that animated her policies in many areas’; and he greatly admired her ‘galvanisation of the British people at a time of accelerating decline’; yet it was her attitude to foreign policy which chiefly excited his passion. Urban was an ardent Cold Warrior. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, in his case fear of the Soviet Union seems to have deranged his judgment.

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